Drones can be hijacked via GPS spoofing attack

The T-Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle from Honeywell, which may become a drone near you soon.

(Credit: Honeywell)

Last year a U.S. military drone doing reconnaissance in Iran disappeared. Iranian government officials there said they had steered the device off course by interfering with its GPS signals.

Such an attack, called GPS spoofing, had previously been considered theoretical. A research team at the University of Texas at Austin has demonstrated that the GPS signals of an unmanned aerial vehicle can be commandeered remotely. This demonstration highlights security concerns with plans to allow thousands of military and civilian drones in U.S. airspace by 2015.

"I think this demonstration should certainly raise some eyebrows and serve as a wake-up call of sorts as to how safe our critical infrastructure is from spoofing attacks," Milton R. Clary, a senior Department of Defense (DoD) Aviation Policy Analyst at Overlook Systems Technologies, said in the university's news release... [Read more]